2009 unambiguously marked a thawing of the bio IPO market – who froze up at the tail end of 2007 – by featuring six offerings, and a seventh filed that may still travel along the neon lights of the midtown Manhattan Nasdaq ticker before we see Dick Clark and friends ring in 2010 from just a block away.

The last deal done that year, in late October, was Nanosphere (NASDAQ: NSPH) who came public at $14 per share raising near $110M in the process – to the sector investors that may feel like it was floated back in the triassic period of the mesozoic era – followed by a 2008 common stock offering that raised an additional $37M; OK, now consider today’s market cap of only $148M, add a current price of $6.68, and sprinkle in some investor dilution, shake well and pour that combination over ice and it must make Nanosphere shareholders feel far from all warm and fuzzy on the inside, right. But I digress…

Today is all about prediction time. That said, and based upon the marginal success of the brave bio IPO class of 2009, as defined here not by gain in market cap but rather an avoidance of total erosion of enterprise value combined with a recent and very interesting announcement out of Burrill & Co., which to my surprise has not yielded much chatter, Life Science Deal Flow therefore is now calling for pure PANDAMONIUM in the bio IPO market for 2010. That’s right, a bold call, maybe, and you heard it heard it here first, and now immortalized in the http internet protocol archives.

Burrill & Co. is a diversified international life science investment company behemoth, from venture capital to private equity to merchant banking even a stalwart in competitive intelligence, publications, conferences and special events – truly amazing. Now add to that lengthy list, I-banking partner to WR Hambrecht + Co. to focus on, yes…taking bio entities public. But not engineering IPO’s like your daddy’s Initial Public Offering rather the dynamic banking duo will be leading companies to the land of liquidity via the OpenIPO® dutch auction route!

Perhaps this process sounds vaguely familiar? That is because in 2004 a little search company by the name of Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) came public through this auction route raising a cool near $2 billion in its trading debut.

The OpenIPO® process provides wider and more diversified access to once difficult to acquire IPO shares. The protocol, engineered by the Nobel Prize-winning economist William Vickrey, places qualified individual investors on an even playing field with that of the institutional big boys, thus yielding an allocation of shares in an impartial way.

Lets run through an example to perhaps better understand just how this works.

• Assume ABCgen, Inc. has recently had their large molecule approved by the FDA and is now ready to take the company public and use the proceeds to build an internal sales and commercial unit to launch their product into the US market. ABCgen thus seeks to sell 10 million shares at $10 to $13.

• Mr. Alpha, my Subaru mechanic and repair shop owner, Mrs. Beta, my neighbor who happens to be an aerospace engineer and Mr. Sigma, the portfolio manager of the $20 billion Next Century Bio Fund all want to purchase ABCgen shares and thus all plan to submit bids, no one is guaranteed shares but with this auction process all have an equal opportunity to acquire. Mr. Alpha wants 200shrs @ $12, Mrs. Beta 1,000shrs @ $13 and Mr. Sigma 7,500shrs @ $8.

Tune into Part #2 of “2010 | Impending Bio IPO Pandemonium” to find out who is able to get the ABCgen shares and why. The steps you can take today to position yourself to participate in the IPO acution process tomorrow, and most importantly why this Burrill/Hambrecht offering is going to set the 2010 Bio IPO market on fire.